In late-19th-century Paris, Charles Baudelaire celebrated the figure of the ragpicker, seeing in his fugitive, marginalized persona an analogue to the modern poet. Both the ragpicker and poet lived on the periphery of the newly emergent bourgeoisie, sifting through and gleaning from its refuse to discover value in the overlooked and beauty in the mundane. Today, Richard Prince is our postmodern poet. Like Baudelaire’s ragpicker, he scavenges the detritus of our image-saturated, consumer-driven culture, claiming lowbrow treasures as his art. For the past three decades, Prince has collected and (re)presented icons of blue-collar Americana: Marlboro Man advertisements, amateur snapshots of biker-chicks, cover images from pulp-fiction books, recycled one-liners, and refurbished hoods of muscle cars. An obsessive devotee of pop genres, Prince has created an ever-expanding archive of photographs, paintings, and sculptures that chronicle a particularly American aesthetics of the cheap, the fast, and the free.

With his Second House (2003), Prince has created the perfect environment in which to showcase his art. Situated in the town of Rensselaerville, New York, where Prince lives and works, the house provides a deliberately anonymous, domestic setting for an installation of the artist’s car-hood sculptures and paintings. A ranch-style residence once used as a hunting camp, the house had been abandoned for 12 years before Prince purchased and transformed it. He gutted the interior to create a simple floor design comprising a foyer, living room, two bedrooms, and an enclosed garage. Camouflaged as a perpetual work in progress—the exterior is clad in exposed insulation material and the interior walls and ceilings are stripped to the dry wall—the house resembles neighboring dwellings in this depressed corner of Albany County. The masquerade effect continues in the backyard, where a 1973 Plymouth Barracuda painted primer black sits on blocks. Only a joke painting hanging outside on the rear wall of the house indicates to passersby that this dwelling is not what it appears to be.

Prince created 11 car-hood sculptures (the cars he has used include a Challenger, Mustang, and Camero) specifically for this site and installed them throughout the house. Hanging on the wall or supported by a pedestal, these abstracted forms oscillate between the conditions of painting and sculpture. They are related to earlier car-hood series in which the surfaces were industrially painted and buffed to slick perfection, but here the hoods are hand-painted, and their texture is matte, almost gestural in appearance. The effect is more Jasper Johns than John McCracken. In addition to the hoods, the house contains a jewelry cabinet embedded into the wall, which displays a necklace fashioned from bread fasteners; planters made from old tires; and a table crafted from a basketball backboard, which holds a selection of first-edition books on Woodstock from Prince’s vast library.

The Second House is an anti-monument. It is the slipshod, hack version of Donald Judd’s exquisitely pristine Marfa, a residence and arts center set in perpetuity in the furthest corner of western Texas. More stage set than museum, Prince’s house seems to defy permanence. But unlike his First House (1993), a temporary installation in a “tear down” ruin in Los Angeles, which was destroyed to make way for new property shortly after the artist’s three-month lease expired, the Second House will be maintained for significantly longer. In spring 2005, several Guggenheim Trustees and patrons purchased the individual car-hood sculptures in the house and promised them to the museum for its permanent collection. The house itself, the other works that comprise its contents, and the land on which it is located have been promised to the Guggenheim by the artist. The museum intends to keep the house open to the public five months a year for at least ten years, after which time the artworks will enter the Guggenheim’s contemporary holdings as a definitive example of Prince’s practice.

—Nancy Spector